One Last Waltz and Other Tales
by EarthScorpion
Summary: All life's a dance, a dizzying dare of danger. And like all things, it comes to an end when the music stops. A collection of Dishonoured short stories.
1. One Last Waltz

**One Last Waltz**

Outside, beyond the cloistered and cleansed walls, the filth and foulness of the city laps against the canals. One two, one two, a brutish boisterous guardsman steps towards a woman clasping her precious vial of stolen elixir. His partner steps back, in a dance which has existed since the very first days man has taken from man. Forwards, retreat, forwards, retreat, and ah! The woman falls into the arms of a waiting wall and can retreat no more. He raises his hand, clasping his baton, and brings it down, once, twice, thrice, until she swoons from the passions of the prance and collapses, spilling red upon the stinking streets of the city.

Kneeling before her, he rifles through her pockets, retrieves the brew he believes will keep him safe, and rises. Off he walks, leaving her a pile in the corner. Unmoving, she sings a sweet symphony of scent, serenading the squeakers who scuttle through the streets. By morning, she will be but gnawed bones and rent remains.

Lightning hums to itself and mechanisms twirl and twist as someone strides through the canals upon stainless steel stilts. His treasured trove of trans gives motive to his movements, each clownish clatter enough to wow and amaze the masses. And indeed this circus freak, pumped full of drugs which drown his desire and numb his nuances seeks to entertain those who cannot gain massage to the higher-class balls of the city. From behind his blackened mask, he chooses the next entertainment.

Watch as he selects an arrow from the quiver on his back. Oh what japes, oh what fun! Watch the crowd below scream and wave their hands, in aware anticipation of what comes next! As one they run, a fluid flow of the folk of Dunwall. But the clown on the stilts releases their arrow, and look! His audience are dancing too! Their flesh blackens and chars and melts in the lambent laughter of dead whales, but still they leap and scream out their songs. Eventually, all a-weary, they collapse, having danced the last dance of men.

And in the barricaded and blockaded buildings off the plaza, a sad, slow shuffling saunter is held in broken ballrooms. The maudlin make-up of these dancers is crimson and brown from the eyes, and blinded by the beauty around them they prance the fling of fools and the dance of the doomed, damned and dying. In rot and ruin they reel, the rhythms of their wrecked reality leading them to their own requiems. The rats root around them, but the rodents leave them be for they rot already.

Ring a ring of roses, how they do all fall down.

But back in the beautiful ballrooms, such death and destruction is far from the thoughts of the fine. The music takes on a minor chord, and partners part, bowing and moving on. In this place, red, white and black drift through the crowd, the corrupt and cruel queens of a city without an empress. Around each other they drift, in their own pavane of plots against each other and against the world. Pleasure they seek, pleasure and power and profit, and in this sickened city some say such are synonyms, for wellness and wealth are twins when money can buy protection from plague.

Someone has been watching black and red and white. An outsider at the party, who was not invited to this iniquity but appeared without acknowledgement. He wears a mask and moves from dancer to dancer unnoticed, for in this place all men wear masks and dress strangely. Some suspect some subtle suspiciousness of thought and deed of him, but this means he is one of an alikeness with the aristocracy. Around and around he goes, unnoticed and all-noticing, listening, watching white and red and black.

And then he requests the next dance from one of the sisters.

I have come to take you away from this place, he says as they saunter, his voice cool and cultured. Surely you tire of the babble and the balderdash of the chattering crowds who flock to feed and feast at your expense.

Oh my, she says, casting an admiring eye over his form. A steel skull stares at her from under a cowl and cloak. Quite unlike the other men at the ball, he neither bulges with blubber nor is but bones and bile. He is built like a military man, yes, but he lacks the stoutness and the stiffness that those sorts usually have gained by the time they are invited to her parties. And he sounds young; not at all like the dried-up dragon she is so intimately familiar with. They get to talking, and he is witty, winsome, and… well, she has drunk no small amount of wine.

By his hand she leads him upstairs, past the guards and all the way up to her personal quarters. In luscious luxury she lies herself down upon her bed, pouting from her – if she says so herself – perfect lips, and waiting for him to make the first move.

And that he does. He is upon him, taking her by the hand. Through the dance of men and women he leads her, fingers upon her fastened fripperies. Legs entwine, one two, one two, and masks clash, scraping and scratching. They separate for a moment, her curtailed corsetry constraining their courante.

Like that, he slides the knife into her heart.

And her dance stops.

Whistling softly to himself, the steel-faced suitor steps smartly away from soaked sheets, sheathing his stiletto. Not one drop of blood has spilt on his clothes, and so he will return to the halls below, to feast and flirt in faked finery, before he departs. They will find her in the morning, and there will be such a to-do!

But not before the stranger, the outsider calls upon the conductor of this callous cavort, and rats swarm out from hidden places to prance and play within the broken ballroom of Lady Boyle.


	2. A Song For a Slave

**A Song for a Slave**

Elaa has always been a slave. She was born a slave, long before the white men came, selling steel swords and dyed fabrics in return for men and women. Her mother had been tribute, paid as submission-tribute to the Nzantu, and so when she was born she too was their possession.

She does not know who her father is. She does not dream of him freeing her; a mere eleven summers of her life have passed, and her immature mind does not grasp how she and the others in the dormitory are different.

But come the white men do, and to the Nzantu she is just another possession, to be traded for five swords which could cut a rat clean in two and a necklace of bright red beads.

The iron collar around her neck is heavy. It hurts. It is too loose, and rubs against her neck leaving it raw and bloody. In the stinking hold of this vessel, which creaks and groans like a dying man, she tries to pad it with the dank straw she sleeps on. It does not help, and the pain and the clank and clatter of her manacled limbs alike keep her up at night. They shaved her head, and then threw her in here to moulder.

She loses all track of time in this metal ship. There is no day. No night. Only two meals a day, and something tells her that they do not always come at the same time. By the time she – and the others, for she is not alone in here – are pulled upright into a cow-bell lowing line, she could not tell a questioner if it was morning or night.

Her first sight of Dunwall is in the rain. It is as if the heavens themselves weep, and that is all too appropriate. The scent of rotting meat hits her around the face, and she recoils at the butchered sea-beast swarming with flesh-cutting insect-men which stares her in the face. The white men gabber at her, but she is lost in the strangeness, and their bah-bah-bah is broken babble.

One moment later, and she is on the floor, copper in her mouth and flowing from her nose. She keeps her eyes closed and head down, dripping blood in a trail of red splatters.

When she is older, she will be able to recognise the words they say here. And even if the noises had faded with memory – and they had not – she would be able to go down to the docks and hear them as another ship loaded with human cargo docks beside the hulks with their butchered whale-meat.

She is not like the whale-meat to the white men. No, she is not.

Dead whales have real value.

They have given her new clothes now. They are tight and itch; in their own way, they are another set of manacles. The bulky man in the bowler hat with skin like hers can talk to her, and he makes it entirely clear that the Mandlesteins want their slaves dressed 'like proper people'. And she has a new collar, marked with the emblem of her masters.

And she has a new name. Because Elaa is not the name of a proper person.

And she must learn to speak the words of the bah-bah-bah white men, and if she speaks in her own tongue in front of the Mandlesteins or one of their guests, she will be beaten.

She is beaten often.

She is at the bottom of the ladder of the house slaves. She learns that fast enough. The white ones – servants, she discovers, a different thing from slaves – are above her. So are the paler-skinned slaves, even if they were also taken from foreign lands.

The mistress of the household does not approve of 'slatternly' behaviour. Oh! If she knew what her husband does, she would be displeased. But then again, she is a liar and a hypocrite. Elaa has seen her with that young man with banana-coloured hair. She peeked at the door, smelling the sick scent of sweat-sweet lusts seeping through. She remembers, though she says nothing.

They have a god here, in this cold wet city... or rather, they do not have a god. What they have is temples. She – Elouise, Elaa; she thinks of herself as both now – can see why they do not. The Dark Man would not carelessly come to this horrible place, and their temples let them keep out of the ceaseless rain. Faceless men in masks lecture the slaves on their wickedness. They took someone she knew away when he cursed someone in the name of the Dark Man. They had to all attend his burning. And then the 'pandos' were beaten. She keeps her beliefs to herself.

For she has her secrets, which she hides even as the years go by.

He comes to her in her dreams. He... she dares not even think his title... He sees her. She sees Him. His skin is as black as hers and His hair has the shine of a sky serpent's scales and His eyes... His eyes are the blackest of all, making even midnight seem like midday. Pah! Not that they know midnight in this sodden land, where Sokolov arcs and oil-flame burn through the night. But to speak of light around Him is not done, for He is the creeping shadows and the darkness of the jungle and the scurrying of the rats.

He speaks to her in her own language. He tells her that she is interesting; that her hate, her fury, her bitterness is like a rosebud. He asks her if she will be cut when she is at the peak of her beauty, or whether her flower will die and she will grow old and gnarled and thorny.

She does not answer Him at first. Elaa – there is no room for Elouise, not in front of Him – would not speak for fear that He would linger. But... no, she is already in his gaze, and his eyes will not leave her.

I would grow thorny, she says, haltingly speaking half-remembered syllables. That way they would bleed if they touched me again.

He smiles, and leans down, kissing her on the forehead. Like no man has kissed her ever; like no woman since her mother. His lips are cold and wet and seem to squirm against her skin like hagfish in a barrel at the market, but she would take this kiss over any which she has received since she arrived in thrice-cursed Dunwall. And he sings to her, speaking his first words to her in the language of this place. What he says fills her with glee.

_"Ring-a-ring o' roses,_

_A pocket full of posies,_

_A-tishoo! A-tishoo!_

_We all fall down._

_"The fish are in the river_

_Eating beggars' eyes,_

_A-tishoo! A-tishoo!_

_We all will die."_

Soon, he promises. You are not the only thing which will come to this city.

They beat her when she speaks a word of her heart-tongue, save when ordered to – and she is never ordered to, for handling the new slaves is not among her duties. But until the end of her days she sings the sweet songs of lost Pandyssia within her head.


End file.
